Get in touch with Walrus

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Frances Webster

CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

Frances co-founded Walrus in 2005. Prior to Walrus, Frances was the New Business Director at Mad Dogs & Englishmen. She spent four years at Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, where she rose to Head of New Business. Prior to that she was at Saatchi & Saatchi working on General Mills, and began her career at Toolbox. A graduate of the University of the South (Sewanee), Frances sits on the Advisory Board for the Babson Center of Excellence at Sewanee, and is also a member of the 4A’s New Business Committee.

Deacon Webster

CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER

Deacon co-founded Walrus in 2005. He spent most of his career at Mad Dogs & Englishmen where he began as a junior copywriter. During his eleven year tenure he opened and led their San Francisco office, and eventually became Partner and Chief Creative officer of the New York headquarters. He has had his work appear in all the major industry shows including ADC Young Guns, D&AD, the One Show, Cannes, Communication Arts, and the Effies. He is a graduate of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. He is extremely pale.

Paula Levine

DIRECTOR OF ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

Paula oversees the accounts department and sets the direction for client services, promoting collaboration across all departments to ensure each campaign is on-strategy and results-oriented. Prior to Walrus, she was a Partner and the Director of Account Management at Mad Dogs & Englishmen. She began her advertising career at Mascola Advertising and is a graduate of the University of Hartford in West Hartford, CT.

Valerie Hope

DIRECTOR OF INTEGRATED PRODUCTION & CREATIVE SERVICES

Valerie leads the production department at Walrus and oversees all creative services involved in campaign development. Prior to Walrus, she founded and ran her own integrated production company, Backbone Productions, where she worked with clients such as Nike, ESPN, Avon, L’Oreal, Sharp, New York Life, Coca Cola, and New York Cosmos. Previously, Valerie spent nine years at Mad Dogs & Englishmen, where she was a Partner and the Director of Production & Creative Services. She began her advertising career working with Dany Lennon at The Creative Register.

Kevin Porter

Media Communications Director

Kevin leads media communications campaigns for Walrus ensuring transparency in media processes and collaboration with the creative team. Prior to Walrus, Kevin was a media director at Wieden + Kennedy where he spent ten years leading the New York media department, increasing agency digital billings by nearly $30 million and working with clients like ABC Television Network, Equinox, Jordan Brand, Coca-Cola, JetBue, ESPN and Disney Pixar. His work there was recognized with several industry awards including an Effie and Media Plan of the Year.

Capabilities

Creative

Our specialty:Calculated Misbehavior

Be smart about being bad. Being bad doesn't mean breaking any laws, it can be as simple as being honest or self-deprecating (most ads are neither). But the more deviant you are, the better it works.

Our ideas combine the things that brands need to make a sale: brand, customer, and market insights; with the things audiences need to be willing to listen: humor, smarts, and self-awareness. Concepts are fully integrated by design to give them the best chance at success.

Brand planning & strategy

Our specialty:Strategies that work.

Consumer insight informs everything that we do from creative to media, and we have
resourceful
ways
to connect with audiences without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on
facilities
and
bowls of M&M's.

We road test every strategy with customers and creatives so we are sure that they
resonate
and
can be
executed against before we commit to anything that sounds good on paper, but doesn't
translate
in
the real world.

Media planning & buying

A fully integrated team for an age that requires it.

Media and creative are now symbiotic - one cannot thrive without the other. The wide array of platforms in which today's campaigns live necessitate a close relationship between idea and execution. At the same time, results that once arrived months after a campaign had run can now be acted upon in real-time. By having everybody in the same room we are able to be fast, smart, efficient, and ultimately deliver better results.

Consulting

Our specialty:Elegant solutions to complicated problems.

We'll apply our brand of out of the box, reductive thinking to any aspect of your business. We've revamped the Economist's ad sales process, reworked user flows for MLBTV subscriptions, devised a native ad-sales platform from scratch for Punch!, re-imagined numerous retail environments and on-boarded bi-coastal sales teams. It’s a big part of what we do, and unlike most consultants, we can help you implement our ideas and findings so what you end up with is a solved problem, not just a 100 page Powerpoint deck.

WHAT IS WALRUS?

Walrus is an independent, next generation advertising agency with a mission to change the way the world feels about advertising by filling it with ideas that are smart, funny, and respectful of people's time and intelligence. The agency's ability to make ads that people notice and love has translated into exceptional results for the likes of Amazon, General Mills, Bloomberg, Staples, Rémy Cointreau and HBO.

WHEN SHOULD YOU HIRE US?

Marketers come to Walrus when they're tired of running the same old ads and generating very little interest from their audience. If you are looking for something that plays it safe and behaves like every other ad in your category, you're not ready for us. We do our best work when we collaborate with brave marketing teams who believe in the selling power of big ideas.

WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT?

Advertisers spent over $72 billion on digital advertising in 2016, surpassing TV for the first time, and yet the creative side of the advertising industry continues to neglect the digital space. The old-guard advertising behemoths are fixated on television, and the digital shops are focused on tactics rather than ideas. Meanwhile, marketers are stuck in the middle, with no choice but to cobble together a roster of specialist agencies in order to meet their growing list of needs. Walrus is here to fill that void.

We combine the tenets of traditional advertising (story telling, strategy, stunts, entertainment, big ideas, production value and brand consistency) with the modern advantages of digital advertising (data, optimization, user experience and efficiency). This means our work is smarter, less predictable, more efficient, platform native, and has digital at the heart of everything.

Today, all media leads to the internet. Billboards are Instagram content, TV spots drive search, mobile generates foot traffic, and packaging can go viral. This changes the way marketers must think. Everything is digital-first, and the abundance of real-time data is driving a constant interplay between media, strategy, PR and creative. It only makes sense that all of these disciplines should be working together hand-in-hand. By bringing every part of the process together under one roof, we are able to move quickly and cohesively to put the best ideas out into the world in the best possible manner.